The new patient experience

Revolutionizing patient services with digital technologies

With the number of specialty drugs on the market continuing to grow, life sciences companies are challenged with increasing access, enhancing affordability and improving adherence services – all while demonstrating measurable outcomes for payers and providers alike.

Companies are investing in solutions that can provide a high level of patient support while alleviating the financial burden on patients and healthcare providers and recognizing the importance of having a comprehensive view of their patients’ journeys.

These imperatives are creating new technology needs in the market--and Hub providers, distributors, global systems integrators and other third-party providers are stepping in to help. However, since each service provider brings its own technology solution, life sciences companies face a complex, disconnected landscape of solutions to manage.

So, how can companies get a consistent view of program effectiveness and use it to make these different solutions and services feel like a single, unified solution for the patient?

Utilizing a patient experience roadmap can help life sciences companies establish an enterprise-grade connected platform for patients and deliver the best patient value.

To truly deliver a better patient and economic outcome, life sciences companies must be able to:

Better Measure Their Investments Life sciences companies have increased their investments in digital engagement. But in doing so, there is an ever-increasing need to connect and coordinate numerous, disparate solutions to ensure well-orchestrated patient experiences. But few are approaching this in a consistent and connected way.

Orchestrate The Patient Experience. There are numerous ways to address the challenges associated with the proliferation of patient services and solutions. One is to go it alone, and try to do everything internally. A second is to embrace the open innovation of the digital health ecosystem – and become the master orchestrator of harmonized patient experiences.

The second approach will not only deliver the best, most holistic patient experience, but also provides a foundation for accurately measuring outcomes – an essential part of value-based healthcare models.

Put The Right Technology In Place A successful ‘master orchestrator’ of patient experiences relies on three key technologies:

Agile Platforms. Cloud-based as-a-service technology platforms which are agile enough to allow solutions to be quickly scaled up and down according to changing business needs.

Seamless Ecosystems. Service providers and healthcare technology companies are making big investments in new and innovative healthcare technologies. The key is to seamlessly incorporate these ecosystem solutions as quickly and easily as possible – this is the essence of effective patient experience management.

Applied Intelligence. Intelligent analytics platforms can not only provide insights but also use predictive algorithms and artificial intelligence to make better business decisions and proactively improve each individual patient interaction and recommend paths to optimize patient support.

The pace and scale at which each of these strategic technologies are deployed will vary from company to company. But we would typically propose a roadmap that looks like this:

Putting the pieces together

So where does the Hub fit in? When becoming an orchestrator of patient experiences, a manufacturer must also consider its approach to insourcing and outsourcing. Most will have adopted one of three models:

Fully Outsourced: The manufacturer relies solely on a Hub to provide services to patients.

Fully Insourced: The people that engage with patients are employees of the manufacturer.

Hybrid Model: A blend where portions of the services are outsourced, but others are retained by the manufacturer.

The value-based healthcare models of the future call for coherent end-to-end patient experiences that harness the very best of the healthcare IT ecosystem, while orchestrating all the disparate elements to enable cohesive and measurable patient journeys. This is the approach that will provide the highest returns for life sciences companies, and lay the foundation for outcome-based business models.